First In His Class (61 page)

Why did she call on that day, before Doar had completed his summary and before it was certain when the impeachment work would be finished? Rodham knew that in essence the impeachment work was over the day she agreed to go to Arkansas. July 9 was the day that the impeachment staff released transcripts of its version of several key White House tapes. The Judiciary Committee transcripts differed dramatically from previously released and heavily sanitized White House transcripts of the same tapes. “Transcripts Link Nixon to Cover-Up” blared the headline in
The Washington Post
. The key quote came from a White House meeting on March 22, 1973, in which Nixon, according to the Judiciary Committee transcript, is heard to say: “I don't give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it'll save it—save the plan. That's the whole point.”

R
ODHAM
left Washington on a humid mid-August morning in 1974. It was fitting that she was not driving herself, but being driven, yet going some-place that she wanted to go and that the owner of the car, Sara Ehrman, her friend and landlady in Washington, did not really want to take her.
Ehrman was
horrified at the thought of Rodham, who to her represented the promising future of the women's movement, abandoning the most
powerful city in the world for a backwater law school in the Ozarks. But if Rodham was determined to go, Ehrman would at least help her get there. She came from a generation “where one follows one's man.”
She persuaded
Alan Stone, a friend who had worked on McGovern's advance team in Texas, to come along as the driver. Rodham's life's belongings went with her—suitcases and a stereo in the trunk, a bicycle strapped to the roof. They drove through Virginia's lovely countryside, past Gainesville, Warrenton, Culpeper, on down to Charlottesville, stopping at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson.

“You are crazy,” Ehrman said to Rodham along the way, playing the role of surrogate mother. “What are you doing this for?” Rodham laughed. She was in a good mood. She said she loved Bill Clinton and wanted to take a chance. Stone defended her. He had been born in Arkansas and had fond memories of the state. The unspoken tension of the trip was that Rodham could not wait to get to Fayetteville and Ehrman, hoping to keep her, kept making detours to historical sites. To make up for the lost time of the side trips, Stone and Rodham drove late into the night. They passed through Nashville after midnight and encountered a surrealistic sight that kept them laughing halfway to Memphis—tipsy old men at a Shriners' convention tooting around on small white motor scooters. Finally, exhausted, they stopped at a roadside motel and all three shared a room. (Years later
Stone would
remember that night and laugh: he could tell the
National Enquirer
that he once slept with Hillary and another woman in a motel room in Tennessee.) On the way across Arkansas, Rodham ate her first catfish dinner. When they reached Fayetteville, they found their way out to Clinton's cottage and unloaded Rodham's possessions.

Clinton had just returned from a long stretch of campaigning in Bentonville. He was, as Stone remembered him that day, “
kind of
frantic.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
 
RUNNING WITH THE BOY

H
ILLARY
R
ODHAM WAS
not the first member of her family to reach Fayetteville.
One morning
during the spring primary season, a fin-tailed Cadillac with Illinois license plates had pulled into the parking lot of the Clinton for Congress headquarters on College Avenue in Fayetteville. A short, burly man in his sixties emerged from the driver's side, limping as he walked toward the door, accompanied by a young fellow. “I'm Hugh Rodham, Hillary's dad,” the older man said to Ron Addington. At his side was Tony Rodham, the younger of Hillary's two brothers. The names were, of course, familiar. Clinton had boasted to his campaign staff about Hillary Rodham: how smart she was; how she was a counsel for the House Judiciary Committee staff; how he hoped that she would be warmly welcomed if she came to Arkansas. Once, at headquarters, he had read aloud from a letter she had written to him about her impeachment work.

Addington felt that he already knew Hillary.
In the
early stages of the campaign, he was constantly taking telephone calls from her. She would check on Clinton's schedule, then offer practical political suggestions. Even then, at the dawn of Clinton's electoral career, from halfway across the country, at a time when she and Clinton were uncertain about their relationship and while she was working long days and nights on the impeachment inquiry, Rodham was pushing Clinton's political interests. “She started calling from day one, several times a day at first,” Addington recalled. “She was telling me, you need to get this done, you need to get that done. What positions we had to fill.”

But apparently Hillary never mentioned that her father and brother were driving down from Illinois. “
Well, how long
are you going to be here to visit?” Addington asked.

“Hell, I don't know,” Hugh Rodham said. “Hillary told me I ought to come down here and help you out.”

The Rodham men had met Clinton a few times during his Yale Law School days, when Hillary brought him home to Park Ridge. Although Hugh was conservative and had never voted for a Democrat, his family was leaning to the liberal side, not just Hillary but also the boys, and he was, above all, a Rodham loyalist. If Hillary urged him to work for Clinton, that was what he would do. It was a matter of family, not politics. Doug Wallace, the campaign press secretary, thought it seemed irrelevant to Rodham “
why he
was down there, besides the fact that his daughter told him to do it.”

The Rodhams reported for work the next morning. What should they do? The office was overcrowded; there were not enough telephones and desks for the staff and volunteers.
But there
were stacks of “Clinton for Congress” signs that needed to be put up along the roadsides in the rural counties. And so the Rodham sign detail was born. Day after day, they would load signs into the trunk and roam the back roads in search of prime locations for cheap political advertising. Sometimes the campaign staff got inquiries from the field about the Yankees in the Cadillac. The calls prompted a discussion about whether they should smear the license plates with mud to obscure the fact that the car and its occupants were not from Arkansas. But the Rodhams were quickly embraced by the campaign staff and most of the people they encountered on the road. The old man seemed “rougher than a corn cob, as gruff as could be,” in Addington's words, but he was a straight talker and a hard worker. In some respects, as a handyman who loved fly-fishing, he was more of a natural in the Ozarks than Clinton, whose main backwoods talent was storytelling. And young Tony seemed to be having the time of his life.

There was another aspect to the presence of Hillary's father and brother in Fayetteville while she was still in Washington. One of the worst-kept secrets at headquarters was that Clinton had become involved in an intense relationship with a young woman volunteer who was a student at the university. According to Doug Wallace, “
the staff
tried to ignore it as long as it didn't interfere with the campaign.” Aside from the Fayetteville woman, the staff also knew that Clinton had girlfriends in several towns around the district and in Little Rock. Perhaps they could disregard his rambunctious private life, but could Hillary? There was some suspicion that one of the reasons she sent the men in her family to Arkansas was to put a check on her boyfriend's activities.

Paul Fray arrived in Fayetteville with his wife Mary Lee to work on the campaign shortly after the Rodhams appeared on the scene. He quickly surmised that “
Hillary had
put the hammer on her daddy to go down there and make sure everything was hunky-dory. It was her little spying mission.”
One afternoon Fray was at Clinton's house in the country, going over the schedule for the next few weeks. “The phone rings and it's Hillary and she's raising hell” about Clinton's behavior, Fray recalled from what he heard of the conversation and from what Clinton told him after hanging up. Hillary, according to Fray, tried to make Clinton jealous by informing him that she was going to sleep with someone in Washington. Clinton “
about broke
down and cried” at that point, but rather than getting mad he launched into a long emotional appeal, saying that Hillary should not “go and do something that would make life miserable” for both of them.

I
N
the May primary against three opponents and again in the June 11 runoff against Gene Rainwater, a state senator from Fort Smith, Clinton was a political whirlwind.
He began
with 12 percent name recognition and little money, and ended up easily prevailing in both races. The other candidates had regional power bases, but they were overmatched by Clinton's organizational skills and energy. The state AFL-CIO was ready to endorse Rainwater until Clinton appeared before the labor board's Committee on Political Education in Hot Springs. “Bill'
s knowledge
and facility with words made our people fall in love with him,” recalled J. Bill Becker, head of the state labor federation. “He just took it right away from Rainwater.” Like so many of the people who were drawn into Clinton's orbit, the workers in his congressional campaign were alternately inspired and exhausted. College students accustomed to staying up late, but also sleeping late, had a hard time keeping pace with him.

He was always on the move from town to town, staying in the homes of old friends or newfound political allies, or at his mother's place if they ended the night near Hot Springs. His schedule was invariably on the remake, thrown off by his compulsion to stop and chat. He was, according to Jim Daugherty, a law student who was one of his drivers, “
more interested
in finishing the conversation than in finishing the schedule.” Sometimes the Fayetteville staff lost touch with him. If he was working the southern stretch of the district, they would leave messages
at the
“Y” City Café, certain that he would stop at that tiny crossroads eatery on his way between Hot Springs and Fort Smith, lured by the gossip awaiting him there and the seductive coconut cream pie. A legion of law students served as his drivers and travel aides.
On the
road between stops, Clinton would take his Professor Quigley—inspired fifteen-minute catnaps, and scribble the outlines of his next speech. Chomping on a sandwich and talking at the same time, he would launch into a soliloquy about the ravages of inflation or of black lung disease, an issue in the mining towns of the Arkansas River valley.

For many politicians, the incessant demands of a campaign are the most
enervating aspects of public life. One face after another, one more plea for money, one more speech where the words blur in dull repetition—at some point it can become too much. Morriss Henry, a state legislator from Fayetteville who along with his wife, Ann, befriended Clinton in 1974, realized one night that he lacked the characteristic that he saw in Clinton, the energy required to go the distance in politics. Henry, an eye doctor, had worked all day performing cataract surgery and came home “totally beat,” but corraled the kids and his wife into the Dodge van to attend a pie supper outside Fayetteville. On the way down, he suddenly blurted out, “
Do we
really have to go?” Two-thirds of the way there, he answered himself. “No! We don't.” He had hit his political wall, and he turned around.

Clinton would never turn around. To him, the prospect of attending a pie supper in “Y” City or Mount Ida seemed invigorating. Pie suppers rank among the most cherished political folk rituals in western Arkansas. On any Saturday night during an election season, communities gather for an evening of entertainment as pies and cakes baked by local women are sold at auction, with the money going to volunteer fire departments or other civic institutions. One savory pecan pie can sell for three figures, especially if the politicians in attendance try to buy some goodwill and end up in a bidding war, as frequently happens. The candidates vie for microphone time between pie sales and announcements. Homemade desserts, picnic tables lined with voters, plenty of talking and raucous storytelling, usually some barbecue at the rear counter—Clinton was never more in his element. He also realized that every pie supper he attended helped him transform his image from the long-haired Rhodes Scholar and law professor into a young man of the people.